First 900 locations will be ready in May with the remainder coming by early summer

Samsung has announced that it has teamed up with Best Buy to help promote the wide range of Samsung mobile products. The partnership between Samsung and Best Buy will see Samsung Experience Shops installed in 1,400 Best Buy and Best Buy Mobile locations around the country.

The installation of the Samsung Experience Shops in Best Buy locations around the country will be rolled out in stages. Samsung expects 900 Best Buy and Best Buy Mobile locations around the country will have Experience Shops by early May, while the remaining locations will have them installed by early summer.

Customers who visit the Samsung Experience Shop will be able to touch and play with Samsung's full range of mobile products including smartphones, tablets, laptops, connected cameras, and accessories. Some Best Buy locations will also get Samsung Smart Service with dedicated Samsung Experience Consultants and Best Buy blue shirt sales associates.

Employees working these Experience Shops will be specially trained on Samsung products including activation and usage. These employees will be able to help customers with demonstrations, basic product services, Samsung account set up, warranty registration, and post purchase support.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because Apple has already made its mark on Best Buy stores with dedicated sections that display various products ranging from iPads to MacBook Airs to iMacs.

"Samsung has been delivering the latest innovation across the consumer electronics category for some time," said Dale Sohn, president of Samsung Telecommunications America. "With the Samsung Experience Shops, we are ensuring consumers get the most of that innovation by learning how to leverage their mobile devices across our ecosystem of consumer electronics. Consumers will have one place to not only explore and learn about our full portfolio of mobile products, but also the support of a Samsung expert to help with selecting and servicing them. This will truly be a unique mobile shopping experience."

Samsung says the largest of its Experience Shops will be approximately 460 square feet. The size of the Experience Shops will of course vary depending on the Best Buy store size.

Rumors surfaced earlier this week that Samsung would soon be launching a line of big-screen smartphones called Mega. Devices such as this will certainly be featured prominently in the Experience Shop locations.

Either way, whatever "staleness" iOS has is far outweighed by its unparalleled third party support. I'm sure an update is coming, but even if the changes are minimal I can deal since switching to another platform would mean either downgrading or losing entire applications.

Much like switching from "boring old Windows" which has remained fundamentally unchanged for about 15 years for something flashy like moddded Linux, I'd be downgrading way too much.

The Linux parallel is spot on as well. You prefer superfluous UI flash over practical utility, applications, and polish.

Seriously, its ok to say you like big screens and SD card slots and all the other things that a big chassis gets you, that's totally cool! Don't pretend the software is anywhere close though. The quantity of applications on Android is highly inflated by shovelware and malware. The situation is worse on tablets, almost nothing out there that is optimized aside from ultra-mainstream stuff like Angry Birds and Netflix.

About half of Microsoft's applications for iOS aren't on Android, the best FTP/SSH/RSS/misc browsing apps are iOS exclusive, there's all kinds of niche stuff (financial, medical) on iOS that isn't on Android, and even Google has better versions of GMail and Maps on iOS.

This is before we even get into games from companies like Blizzard, 2K, EA, Epic, id, and all the typical stuff that are in these comparisons, which you'll automatically write off because they're "just games".

Hell, you'll probably write off medical and financial apps as well, "who cares" you'll say? Its all about depth, that's the point.

quote: Again, there isn't a single thing you can do on IOS that you cant with Android. There are a ton of things you can do with Windows that you cannot do with Linux

Not true at all, you can find applications to fill in almost anything you can do on Windows. The level of polish and depth in applications is the difference.

It is exactly the same as the difference between iOS and Android.

Android's selection is shallow by comparison, and based on the emphasis some of its users place on inflated bulletpoint features while ignoring fundamental things like the quality of screens, battery life/performance balance, and third party support, its users are shallow too.